Hello, I’m Anne Marie Mohan, senior editor with Packaging World. Recently I spoke with Alex Shikany, executive vice president of A3, the Association for Advancing Automation, about new data on packaging robotics and what it means for manufacturers. Today we dive into the latest A3 numbers, including strong growth in robot orders, the rise of collaborative robots, and how workforce challenges are accelerating automation across industries.
Yeah, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me and if you have the questions and you are okay with them, that means that there is a considerable amount of data in the report on robotics for packaging.
Alex Shikany:
Yeah, so packaging, picking, and placing is really the distinction, the subcategory that we have data for, and that rolls up to what we call material handling applications. So packaging, picking, and placing is one subcomponent of the total material handling subset. Material handling is the largest category from an application side that we do track. So it’s good to have that kind of sub detail. And I can share with you what this is showing is for the last three-year period, end of 2025, this is the material handling large category broken out by those subcategories that I mentioned to you. The red is the packaging, picking, and placing that I was referencing. You can see that it’s pretty consistently, almost half of material handling applications in North America from an order standpoint every quarter, but it ebbs and flows with everything. There’s a little bit of cyclicality.
It depends on certain customers and orders and things like that. But the real takeaway here is look what happened in the end of 2025 where packaging, picking, and placing really took off there and really notably grew. And so I think as the backdrop to some of our later questions that the conversation will take us to, I wanted you to have that context that that’s what our data shows, and I believe that this is going to continue. Now, this may be a spike. We’ve seen spikes before, right? You’ve seen some in here where it goes up a nominal amount and then it returns. But I think generally speaking, packaging, picking, and placing is one of the most approachable areas for customers to start automating and using robotics. And I think you’re seeing some of that reflected in the data here.
Anne Marie Mohan:
Okay. That’s very interesting to see that huge spike. I don’t know if this still applies though, but if this is under the subheading of material handling, when we talk about food and consumer goods, are these different applications and packaging, are these picking of the actual food, the product, or would that still be considered packaging?
Alex Shikany:
Yeah, so this is actually food and consumer goods. We measure our statistics into two verticals. So we just looked at material handling, which is on the application side. So we break the entire market by each quarter into applications. So material handling, coating and dispensing, assembly, those types of things. The total number breaks out. And then in parallel to that, but separate, we break it into industries, and so they actually don’t cross over to each other. So for example, I can’t tell you how many packaging, picking, and placing robots were deployed specifically in food and consumer goods. That’s kind of one constraint to our current structure. But what I can tell you is that if you look at this slide over here, you can see that food and consumer goods had a really good year in 2025. In fact, it was the leading growth category by percentage in terms of new orders last year.
And just anecdotally knowing this, because I talked to our members and I know what types of applications generally speaking happen in food and consumer goods, packaging, picking, and placing is a big component of that. And to answer your question about could it mean the robot manipulating food items coming down a line or putting them in a box or orienting them properly for some process, absolutely. We see that we have members that do that type of integration, those types of technologies and solutions. But it can also mean things like palletizing, for example, at the end of line in food and consumer. So once the boxes or the bins are already assembled, putting them on pallets, maybe doing wrapping applications or manipulating them at that stage. So it’s really up and down the line in that industry. It is in most other industries.
Anne Marie Mohan:
Okay. Okay. So let’s see. You have it broken down into food. I’m trying to see if there’s all other industries might include other CPG applications as well, I would imagine.
Alex Shikany:
Yeah, so food and consumer goods generally speaking is going to encompass certainly food customers, but I believe CPG customers, P&G, Unilever, those types of companies or customers would typically fall in the food and consumer goods area. The all other industries includes things that aren’t broken out here. For example, agriculture, warehousing, logistics, and a few other ones in there. Textiles would be in there. I believe some of those that all just roll up kind of the long tail that just rolls up into that all other category, but still a very important category for robotics. Yeah.
Anne Marie Mohan:
Okay. So I see that you break out in material handling, the picking, placing, and then palletizing is separate. So it looks like that is growing, it looks like it’s growing faster than palletizing or is it just a larger segment and they’re both growing?
Alex Shikany:
That’s a really good question. So palletizing is this green slice here, and you can see that it is smaller by contrast. And historically speaking when you look at how it compares to packaging, picking, and placing, but generally speaking, it is growing over time. So you can see that in 2023 it was right, it was about this size. I don’t have the numbers on this particular slide, but I have them that obviously undergird this graph. And then you can see it’s basically double at the end of the time period with periods of spiking in here of significant proportion. So it’s still a growing application, certainly within material handling because like I said, workforce shortages, people, it’s a repeatable task that is approachable from an automation perspective. It’s generally well understood by the marketplace right now in terms of what movements, what types of technology are needed to successfully palletize a solution. There are many vendors who can successfully do it. And so as we get into that environment, it makes approaching it if you’re an SME or you’re a company that’s coming into this early on, it’s an easy, one of the more easy applications to say, yeah, let’s go ahead and do that first and build the muscle memory.
Anne Marie Mohan:
I feel like I see more palletizing in packaging applications than picking and placing a primary packaging, secondary packaging. So I’m just trying to, when we’re talking about material handling palletizing and the material handling, packaging, picking, and placing, would the packaging, picking, and placing also include palletizing within packaging applications? Sorry to get picky.
Alex Shikany:
Usually there is a little bit of kind of murkiness in the data in that it’s not always cut and dry and clear, but what we ask for from the manufacturers is where their robots are deployed when they know what it’s doing, that’s what it gets categorized as. So for example, a unit within this red that’s reported within this red subcategory is because the manufacturer reported it as being deployed in a packaging, picking, or placing application, not a palletizing of that application. But similarly, if a unit was reported in this green area, it was because that robot is actually doing the palletizing at the end of line, for example. It’s doing some element of that application. And so there’s not much bleed over as far as we can control it in terms of asking for the manufacturers to tell us what those robots are being deployed to do, if that makes sense. I know it can sound a little complicated.
Anne Marie Mohan:
I guess I was just surprised because as I said, I see a lot of packages starting with palletizing if they’re going into robotics rather than picking and placing of product or cartons into secondary packaging. So that’s very interesting to see.
Alex Shikany:
Yeah, for sure. Like I said, I think the difficulty of a palletizing application, there can be difficulty with mixed pallets, different size containers, things like that. You have to know how to orient them properly and most efficiently. And so there’s challenges certainly with palletizing, but when it comes down to picking, packaging, or placing items, it just goes to almost another granularity of complexity in some respects. You have to know what are you picking or packaging or placing what items. It can be a lot of different SKUs, potentially a lot of different form factors. If it’s food, there needs to, there’s regulations on how you can handle that food. So it just becomes a little bit more complex at that stage, which is why I think what you said is that you typically see an entry point for people coming in on the palletizing side because it’s a little bit more ubiquitous. It’s crates, it’s cartons, it’s maybe a little more approachable than some of the packaging applications might be on average.
Anne Marie Mohan:
So switching gears, the report says that collaborative robots reach nearly 20% of total orders in 2025. Do you know how much of this 20% is represented by packaging applications.
Alex Shikany:
I don’t have that handy right now. It’s buried a little bit in our data, and 2025 was the first year we actually started reporting collaborative robot statistics, and it actually was pretty volatile quarter to quarter. It was first quarter started off. We didn’t know really how to measure it to the history because it was our first quarter. The second quarter it expanded drastically, then reduced in the third quarter and then really expanded in the fourth quarter. It follows a similar trajectory as the main market that we looked at. When you look at collaborative robots in general, by far, if not more than the overall market, material handling is far and away the biggest application. And knowing that of material handling, packaging, picking, and placing is right there in terms of being the top subcategory within material handling. So without being able to give you the hard numbers, yes, packaging, picking, and placing is a very important application for collaborative robots, and they’re certainly being used in those types of those applications.
Anne Marie Mohan:
And yeah, I would say over the last, what, three, four years, we’re seeing a lot more or we’re seeing cobots that can handle palletizing applications. So I would imagine there’s a lot more of that happening as well.
Alex Shikany:
Across the board as more collaborative robots get released and developed. And again, the value proposition of collaborative robots kind of inherently is that they need less rigid safety caging or things like that because usually power and force limited or other safety solutions with them. So you can have a more open collaborative kind of environment when you put them out there. You can have people working near them. And so I think we’re going to continue to see that grow over time as more collaborative robots are released that can handle heavier payloads maybe, or have more degrees of freedom or different things like that, different sensing technologies included, they’re going to be able to do more for sure.
Anne Marie Mohan:
Okay. So you talked a little bit earlier in our discussion of the graphs about the workforce challenges and how they are driving the adoption of robotics. How much of a driver is that? If you look across the board at some of the other drivers? I feel like workforce challenges are the main driver, but I’m interested.
Alex Shikany:
Yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, workforce is one is when we talk about these things to various groups of people, to users that automate, we ask the government and they engage with us. Workforce is top of the list in almost every single conversation. It’s something that pretty much every industry vertical we looked at is wrestling with in one way or another. It’s hard to find the people to come in to want to do the jobs, and then it’s hard to keep the people there to do certain tasks. And so the pipeline is already dried up in many cases. And the retention is a big issue because, and to have a successful manufacturing or distribution or any kind of business, you need to have some level of stability and growth. And that’s what automation and robotics is providing. And that’s why I think we’re seeing the market grow is because of what we just said there.
But I have young kids, I’ve spoken with audiences at colleges, universities, things like that, people coming into the workforce, even people getting retrained into automation roles. And one of the things they’re looking for in a rewarding career is 21st century tools and technology. And so when they’re looking at, do I want to go work for this company? Should I go into this industry? One of the factors they’re weighing is what’s the environment in which I’m going to be working in? And a lot of them view robotics and automation as, this is exciting, these are the tools I need to be working with. It’s like, and the more companies that are recognizing that, I think it is just another reason why they choose to adopt automation today is because if they don’t, operating in an environment that’s 20 years old or whatnot, doesn’t have the latest and greatest technology, they’re not going to be as attractive in vying for the human workers that so many companies need. So that’s the other element of it, but it’s definitely at the top of the list.
Anne Marie Mohan:
That’s interesting. A friend of my son’s, they went to college together. He is working at Proctor and Gamble with robotics, and it’s not something he trained for, but it kind of naturally fell in line with what he had majored in, which I believe was probably engineering. And he loves it. I mean, he finds it really fascinating. And I think you’re right that people don’t want to work in the dusty, dark packaging operations of old, they’re looking for something that’s 21st century.
Alex Shikany:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I liken it to a lot of times I’ll reference, it’s like accepting a job and getting a laptop, but the company hasn’t supplied you with the Microsoft Office software programs. Here’s Notepad and Microsoft Paint, and we’re expecting you to do the same things, but your competitors and your peers that are working at other companies, they’ve got access to Excel and Chat GPT and Copilot and PowerPoint. And so in the physical world, that’s what I believe we’re collectively experiencing with automation is that, okay, I have to look and behave in a way in the global marketplace that’s up to par with the technology standards of the workforce. For sure.
Anne Marie Mohan:
I love that analogy. That’s really one that I think everybody can relate to
Alex Shikany:
I spend a lot of hours in Excel and Microsoft Office, so I probably spend too much of my time thinking about it.
Anne Marie Mohan:
So SKU proliferation has been something we’ve been watching for years, but I think some of our readers, the CPGs are getting more involved in e-commerce. How are those two factors, e-commerce growth and SKU proliferation, pushing companies toward more flexible packaging automation?
Alex Shikany:
Yeah, I think it’s an evolution. My read on it is it’s evolution based. It’s being pulled along by the demand, the demand side, people, U.S. consumers are used to now being able to order a tremendous number of different SKUs in one order potentially. I mean, e-commerce orders have never been higher. The ease of placing an order and fulfilling it and the speed to delivery, we all know is as fast as it’s ever been, which places a lot of pressure downward on that supply chain that supports that experience from a user perspective. And so what that means is because we’re not, the consumers are not likely to change our behavior now that we’re used to it, our appetites have been satiated. We’re like, okay, I like this. I want it same day, or I want to order all these things, some big, some small. We’re putting that pressure downward on that supply chain.
And so I believe that the automation that helps support the delivery and that mechanism knows that, and they’re plugged in with the CPG companies and they know that this is what’s being asked of us, is to provide flexible solutions that are easy to deploy, relatively modular, because demand can change with different SKUs, and that mix is going to change over time. And sometimes it’s small batch, sometimes it’s large batch, it depends on the time of year, seasonal demand swings and things like that. And so we need to provide solutions from an automation vendor perspective that address those needs from those customers. And that’s what you’re seeing. You’re seeing more flexible picking solutions. You’re seeing collaborative robots. You’re seeing mobile that can be redeployed on the software side. You’re seeing simulation, digital twins, you’re seeing planning at a scale that we’ve never seen before because of the expensive decisions that are being made and the expensive downtime that were to come if something were to go wrong. And all of that has led to a lot of innovation on the robotics and automation side and is leading to the mix of products that are what you said, flexible and provide that environment so that companies can make changes quickly and have very few defects, if any.
Anne Marie Mohan:
Okay, great. Well, a lot of our readers are small to midsize manufacturers, and we are talking about innovations. Are there technological innovations that are making automation more accessible to this group that were historically relied on manual labor?
Alex Shikany:
Absolutely. It goes right from the hardware all the way up through the software and the support. Let’s start with the hardware itself. We have hardware like collaborative robots, which right off the bat is more approachable to a lot of SME-type companies than the thought of deploying a traditional automation system of old that you picture in your head where it’s in a cell and there’s caging and safety stops and things like that. So right off the bat, the hardware is more approachable. You can hand guide it, training the robot. The robots can, like I mentioned, be hand guided. They can use vision systems now with AI, with inputs from the human, evaluate the environment and the line or whatever and be able to optimize its path and its picking and how it grasps an object. These are all relatively more common technologies in a products today than they were certainly when I started in 2012.
And people have been in this industry a lot longer than I have will tell you, it hasn’t always been like it is today in terms of ease of deployment like that. And then I mentioned simulation and the software side with artificial intelligence, the availability of data is so plentiful that our systems, the systems that help drive and give information back to the users, the humans, it’s more transparent than it’s ever been. It’s easier to identify and get down to granular issues at this time, this pick was wrong or whatever the variable was that was wrong. And so those things all feed into ease of deployment and approachability. And there’s so many different form factors now that if you have a problem as an SME, you’re looking for a solution. You don’t necessarily know you’re coming in, I need this robot, or I need this vision system.
I need a solution to this challenge. And that’s what this industry has done so well with such a strong system integrator community. These integrators have seen it, almost seen it all. They know how to attack certain industries or applications differently than others. And a lot of them are actually offering some more turnkey solutions now that they might not have in the past where they have welding cells or packaging cells or something like that that come with a set amount of hardware, and you can almost buy it off the shelf a little bit with less custom integration than a whole new project might’ve been in the past. So yeah, it’s more friendly to SMEs than it ever has been before. I would say that’s a fair characterization.
Anne Marie Mohan:
That’s excellent news for our readers for sure. I mean, I think in the past we heard the robotics manufacturers talk about how they have made these systems easier to use, easier to program, but sometimes when I talk to people in the field, they say, that’s not really the case or it’s not as easy as they make it seem. But it sounds like that’s changing significantly recently.
Alex Shikany:
Yeah, there’s always going to be growing pains, certainly, and nothing’s a hundred percent for sure, but on the average, coming from a statistical side, when you look at 10, 20 years ago, how easy was a robot to program in terms of the traditional sense using a teach pendant and doing the things you need to do to get that right versus what’s available on average today, which is you could roll a robot in on a mobile base and it could do a similar application where there may not need to be any manual programming on certain applications. I’m not saying that’s a widespread thing yet, but we’re definitely, you could say it’s fair to say we’re moving in that general direction with AI and vision systems and collaborative technologies on the robot itself and within the cells collaborative applications. We’re definitely moving in that direction. So it is definitely fair to say that robots and automation are more approachable today in many respects than they have been ever before, which is great for SMEs, to your point. It’s great for everybody, but certainly for that group.
Anne Marie Mohan:
So when we look at the charts and based on the 2025 data trends, what’s your outlook for packaging robotics, say over the next two to three years? Or is that very easy to predict?
Alex Shikany:
Yeah, easy to predict, I would say not very much is easy to predict in the world of forecasting. If you’re super good at it, then you probably aren’t working in forecasting anymore. You’re playing the stock market or you’re doing other things, you’re on an island somewhere. But I would say we don’t typically provide a forecast just because it’s just not something we’ve historically done. We typically focus on the issues as we see them and then report the data going forward. But personally, having my experience in the market, seeing this data working in this industry for 14 years now, I’m bullish on packaging robotics in the next two to three years. I think you saw the graph I showed it to start this call where demand clearly was going up at the end of last year. You can make a generalization on average, that red category has been linearly growing over time, at least the last few years.
Do I see the demand for robotics and automation in packaging, picking, and placing going down? And if so, why? I don’t see it going down. I see the drivers of packaging, picking, and placing is a very, it’s one of the 3D applications in a lot of cases. It’s a dull, dirty, and dangerous job in some cases, depending on what your packaging, picking, or placing. And that’s where the labor challenges are the most prominent right now is finding people who, number one, want to are interested in taking a job like that. Number two, sticking around to make it a career or something is very challenging, and it’s not safe. A lot of times it’s repeated movements, there’s ergonomic challenges. And because of that, I think automation is right there. And I think more and more companies are realizing that. They’re saying, I know I have to use robotics and automation. Where am I going to use it first? Well, the robot can pretty reliably fill this void of not having a human workforce to pick this product and put it here into a box and get it moving down my production line. And I think that’s only going to continue. And again, we talked about food and consumer goods being a good example of this, but I mean, there’s packaging applications all up and down the board of those different industries that I showed you earlier. So packaging lays across all the different industry verticals. I think it’s one of the most important applications that automation can help solve for customers. So I’m bullish on the next two to three years. Yep.
Anne Marie Mohan:
Okay. Excellent.
Alex Shikany:
That’s as good as a forecast as we can get without giving you a percentage.
Anne Marie Mohan:
Yeah. So if you were advising packaging operation on where to focus their automation efforts or how to start moving toward automation, what would you say to them?
Alex Shikany:
Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, first and foremost, I work in an association that has almost 1500 member companies that I get the opportunity to engage with, learn from, and show their cool videos and talk to large audiences and say, Hey, look at how cool this industry is. And so I’m really grateful to have the opportunity to see that firsthand and talk to the companies that are doing it. If I’m advising a packaging executive, the first thing I would say is get connected. I would say I would give them a list if it were me, I would say after hearing what their needs were, I would say, sure, you need to go meet and talk to these people. And I would say, get connected. Ask them your questions, integrators, the suppliers of the robots themselves. If the questions had to do with the hardware, there’s so much expertise in this market, and everybody is so willing to connect and talk through, that’s what they do at their core.
And so that would be the first and foremost thing is get connected. Read articles like the one you’re writing, reach out to people at associations that are in your space that can help you with information. But from a deployment standpoint, one of the things that we have been saying for a while with support of our members is start smart. Not necessarily start small or start simple, though. That can often be what people decide to do but start smart. Evaluate your own operation, understand where your bottlenecks are, where your weaknesses are, what problems are you really looking to solve. Once you understand where you’re coming up short or where you think you need help, then start in that smart area approach. And if it’s end of line, for example, because it’s putting the products into a box, it’s like a packaging application or a palletizing application, that’s great. There are plenty of solutions you can choose from. Start there and say, I think I want to start here, build some muscle memory, understand internally how to maintain and operate, deploy an automation system, and then I’ll expand, I’ll grow. But embracing the technology, not as a patch to fix a one-time thing, but more of an institutional culture. We’re going to get great with robotics and automation. We’re on a journey. We know we need to be sophisticated to compete globally because that’s the macro trend. So let’s start somewhere where we’re reasonably sure we can get an ROI, but it’s not going to be too complex. And then we’ll expand out from there once we start building the capabilities. So I think that would be my primary feedback to someone who asked.
Anne Marie Mohan:
Excellent, excellent feedback and advice. Yeah, I appreciate that, and I appreciate this interview so much. I learned a lot. And I love your enthusiasm for robotics. So wonderful.
Alex Shikany:
I’m glad that came across. It is one of the coolest, in my view, I’m not biased at all, but it’s one of the coolest just spots to be in because it’s changing every single day and there’s so much opportunity to benefit the world working on this stuff. So I appreciate you reaching out for this interview, and I look forward to collaborating in the future.
